Multiple Bad Things

Before the workers’ actions begin, Back To Back regular Simon Laherty tells us that this is a play.  It’s not real.  But he also refers to ‘trigger warnings’, both a parody of the current fashion for such warnings but at the same time a list of things that could trigger anxiety or a sense of threat.  So, a kind of ambiguity is planted right from the start.  What is Laherty’s role in the play?  After his warning welcome, he goes to a desk, stage right, where he plays solitaire, gambles or watches wildlife documentaries.  Is he an administrator?  A supervisor?  He neither administrates nor supervises and he displays zero interest in the work or the workers’ conflicts... until the end.

What we experience here is a sort of workplace drama in which an escalating variety of ‘bad things’ occur…  There are multiple bad things in our world (each of us could make a list) – some of which we feel keenly – they oppress us and we fear them - others we may choose to deny or ignore.  About others again we might be defeatist or fatalistic.  Each of us takes our own set of bad things into Multiple Bad Things, so that we come – or not – to fill and occupy this space as we watch the workers go about their task.  We can interpret allusions, or we can recognise their behaviours.  As the play proceeds, some of these behaviours are explicit, or blatant: they are disturbing, or maybe infuriating.  Others are more enigmatic: we must work with what’s presented to make sense of them.  For added clarity, the workers’ words are projected in fragments on a huge oval screen on which float pretty or ominous clouds. 

As to the task at hand, Mainwaring struggles on, while heavily bearded Scott Price prefers to sprawl in an inflatable flamingo and make derisive and sometimes acute remarks on his workmates, or the state of things in general.  Later, Bron Batten, dressed differently from Mainwaring and Price in a short-short pink ‘sunsuit’, will deflate the flamingo.  Which looks mischievous – giving Price his comeuppance – or is it malicious?  He certainly gets very angry and becomes very threatening.  The action hovers on the edge of violence.  Mainwaring continues to work on the structure; it is sometimes puzzling, and she asks Batten for help.  Batten does help, a bit, but breaks off to taunt Price, drape herself ‘sexily’ on the structure, and, as an able-bodied person, condescend (kindly) to disabled Mainwaring.  Such are the explicit ‘bad things’ on stage but they are also symptomatic of our world and the inferences are there for us to make.  More explicit is a series of automated phone messages – text on screen, the voice of Rachel Griffiths – in which the indifference and indeed hatred and contempt underlining the bullshit of ‘your call is important to us’ is made plain.  Interestingly, this gets the biggest laugh of the evening.  We all know this ‘bad thing’.

And so we see the multiple bad things, and while there is a building tension, there is also the feeling that directors Tamara Searle and Ingrid Voorendt – and Script Consultant Melissa Reeves - have joined together a number of elements and ideas and moments that arose from the group devising/improvising/rehearsal process.  But the seams do show – and there are longueurs - as we move from moment to moment – from bad thing to bad thing.

Multiple Bad Things is not an easy play.  We are not presented with a story or a plot – just a situation within which there are layers of meaning.  It demands interpretation, understanding and insight.  There are moments or wry or cynical humour but overall this play leaves us with a feeling of alienation and of ennui, of our modern lives which we structure with meaningless work or anger or cruelty.  It’s a bleak and sad picture, redeemed only by a touching gesture of affection in its very final moment between Mainwaring and Laherty.

Back To Back Theatre is acclaimed internationally, receiving the highest awards for its innovations, originality and its reshaping of theatre itself.  They have returned from a sold-out show in Brussels.  Nevertheless, for me, Multiple Bad Things has the feel of perhaps taking their audience for granted and of not being quite as challenging and revealing as they might think.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Ferne Millen